Overview
- Jesse Pollak said he is stepping back from day-to-day leadership of the Base App and handed control back to Coinbase with Jordan Fish (Cobie) taking over, a change Pollak announced on July 15.
- Pollak publicly admitted the network’s multi-year push for on-chain social features and creator coins “was wrong” and said those experiments “disintegrated completely,” which he blamed for diverting resources from core infrastructure.
- Base will reorient its 2026 strategy around three priorities—trading, payments, and AI agents—with concrete plans to onboard more on-chain assets and make stablecoin payments broadly usable for people and businesses.
- Pollak will concentrate on technical upgrades including Azul, the Beryl upgrade and the B20 token standard, privacy work, and ledger features, even as late‑June mainnet stalls have raised short-term reliability concerns that he now aims to fix.
- Base retains advantages from Coinbase distribution and recent developer traction in payments—x402 payment volume hit about $48 million by April—but the market will watch Beryl activation, stability improvements, and developer activity to judge whether the pivot succeeds.